I'm late to the party in regards to Niall Ferguson's egregious cover on the weekly grocery shopper once known as Newsweek magazine. (First, Parson Meacham Jesuses up the thing to the point where anyone not wearing a veil wouldn't have been caught dead reading it, and then it gets handed off to Tina Brown. There were galley slaves back in the day that had a more comfortable career path than that title's had over the last 10 years.) The debunking has been rich and full, but this kind of thing makes me a little crazy.

This is not a literary feud. One person in this fandango has been caught writing demonstrable untruths in a national magazine, and this person also happens to teach at the most prestigious university in the general vicinity of Brattle Street. Earlier today, I made a bungle and attributed a quote to Chuck Todd that actually was said by Ted Cruz, who's running for the Senate from Texas. Chuck is well within his rights to be angry at me, but there is no "feud." I was sloppy and made a mistake. Period. Krugman /a> — and Jim Fallows, and Andrew Sullivan, and The Atlantic in general — are not after Ferguson because they disagree on the advisability of re-electing the president. They are after him because what he wrote was... not... true. This should matter more.